Hurt feelings

Today is the third (fourth? who's counting) time in two weeks I cried because of things my students said. I guess I am starting to doubt that I can even teach. But what I wanted to leave a note about is this: we always talk about how we have to be careful when we talk to our students, but nobody ever tells students they should be careful about the way they talk to their teachers. Teachers have feelings, too. I suppose it's fine of the time, but it's the students who want to be teachers that I am sad about. It just seems that there is a serious case of split personality. When you're a student you're a student only, and when you're a teacher you forget you were a student. I'm just gonna go mop around some more.

Division

So far I have largely ignored the way Americans write their division: divisor first then dividend. I learned it differently. Mind you, the algorithm is exactly the same, it's just the way it is written that differs: dividend, divisor and quotient are all in the same line, in that order, and the rest is the same. Now that I teach elementary math I have to train myself to do it the "wrong" way. Can anybody explain to me why the order in which these numbers are written in the algorithm seems to contradict what is being done, or is that just my perception influenced by years of drill I was subjected to? Also, whenever I show "my way" to people they say it doesn't make sense even though it is exactly the same process. Does that show the lack of understanding or lack of willingness to understand?

Insane

Ok, so I have no idea how other people do it, but I feel like I am on the verge of drowning. Getting ready for classes, grading constantly, now we'll start math circles for teachers, need to write grants. Yikes.

So, we've been going for almost three weeks now. Apart from feeling like there should be 36 hours in a day, I'm enjoying both my classes a lot. Since I have some grading to do and I have to get ready for tomorrow's class I'll only write two observations.

El. math teachers course: From what I can observe (and this class isn't exception, I don't think) my students believe that in order to learn mathematics they only need to solve problems. But how can you find a complement of a set if you don't know what a complement of a set is. It is hard work to make them learn definitions. Or even to see the value of definitions.

Secondary: There was a homework problem that I assigned that asked "How would you want your students to respond to question: Explain why the sum of the digits of any multiple of 3 is itself divisible by 3." The question came form Principles and Standards, so one might imagine that this is material that these students will be expected to teach once they become teachers. I wonder what response you think I got. I'll tell you about three that I found most surprising: they said that they wouldn't expect their students to know the answer since they themselves don't know it. What was surprising, or rather what made me sad, was the fact that not only did they not know, but they didn't express any desire to find out. They didn't say "We'll look it up" nor "Can you tell us?", and they definitely didn't say "I'll work it out." I guess it's only a beginning of the semester :) Maybe we'll see some improvements as the class goes on.

New school year

Where did the summer go? Well, I do know. Moving takes time and energy, and settling in is usually fun. And frustrating. In any event, the school starts tomorrow. Crazy. I have two classes: Math for elementary teachers and Methods for secondary. I never really feel ready for any of the classes. But I'm sure it'll be fun.

I almost forgot. Mark and I were looking for dual flush toilets. As a friend of our would say "a peepee and a poopoo". We went all over the place looking and asking and we happened to be in Lowe's for something else, so I decided to see what they can order. The man in the plumbing was most helpful. He was looking them up and we ran into one made by kohler, I think, and it read 1.4/1 gpf. He read "This one uses one and a quarter gallons and one gallon per flush".

Long time no write

Well, here I am, with few minutes to write. In case anybody missed me, and they don't know where I've been, here is a little update. We moved. Well, most of us moved. We now live in Salt Lake City, and life is good! Our new house is starting to feel like home. There are few more boxes that need to be dealt with, but it looks decent. Three days after we moved in, I had to go to another mathy thing, this time at AIM in Palo Alto. We were shipped out to learn how to run Teacher's circles. In case anybody heard of Math circles, that's basically it, just for teachers. So anyway, we're starting that in September and if any Salt Lake middle/high school teachers happen to see this and are interested they should let me know. But I'm sure I'll find them either way.

Then PCMI started at Park City. I have expected a lot more from it, and am rather disappointed. PCMI organizes a three week event that is supposed to do what administration thinks is vertical integration. There are several programs running at the same time, and people are supposed to interact and learn. There is usually a mathematics topic around which the whole program is structured. This year it is statistical mechanics. There are research program, graduate seminar, undergraduate seminar, mathematics education research seminar, secondary school teacher prof. development, and professional developers' seminar. I am there as a part of prof. development program, but that only meets about 1hr a day. The rest we hang out with high school teachers and observe what they do. The teachers' schedule is something like this:
8:20-8:45 there is one or the other administrative thing that needs to be addressed.
8:45-11 teachers work in groups on some math problems, statistics and probability. Good idea, but I think poor implementation and not great problems.
11-12 research teaching topics. This as far as I can tell was just a disaster. We were given a choice of several topics, groups were formed based on a topic, we got a list of few research articles that we were supposed to read and write a little report about. However, at least in my group there wasn't much discussion. We each wrote up a blurb on the article we read, but when the time was to write it up, they had the prof. development session running parallel, and I think half of us were gone. I think I am likely to miss tomorrow's presentations.
12-1 lunch
1-3 working group. I went to geometry, but that too was rather disappointing. It mostly appears to be Geometer's Sketchpad advertisement.
3:15-4:15 cross program. This is where we listen to talks whether they're given by research mathematicians, high school teachers, math ed people.... or there is nothing.
4:30-5:30, 6 is when prof. development group meets and so far this mostly consisted of them giving us math problems to work on. Hello! Half the people have Ph.D. is math. It just seemed like not a good use of time.

In the meantime, my preparation for my classes has stalled. My preparation for the session of ThEMaT has stalled as well, and I am supposed to be presenting it in less than three weeks (this is another potential PD that involves geometry). Also, since I am back in the most fun Salt Lake there are plenty of things to do that do not involve sitting at a computer. However, if the temperatures continue the current trend I may be writing more :)

Nice!!

Small world

The second day of the conference is over. First of all I have to say that everybody was very civil so far, although there were some gentle pokes at the "other camp" and allusions to math wars, and who does what and how. Clearly, we do it right and they do it wrong, but the tone was leaning towards "we can still learn from each other". The last point actually brings me to some cultural differences I find in the two fields: mathematics and education. In my experience mathematics is very generous field. People do their work and are extremely open to sharing it, providing their written work, talking about it in private even if it's not really finished, sharing ideas and collaborating with others. Yes, there are some isolated cases that got press coverage lately that would imply otherwise, but that's what they are: isolated cases. My short experiences with education people was somewhat different. Maybe I have run into their isolated cases, you tell me. I'll mention two that happened today. We had a session in which University of Michigan people talked about their content course for elementary teachers masters program, and University of Delaware people talked about their preservice elementary mathematics courses. They seem to have been very similar to each other, and both seemed like very good ideas. So I said something to the effect that it wouldn't make sense for all of us who might be teaching these types of courses to reinvent a wheel, and would they be willing to share their materials. There was a noticeable silence before I got an answer that in short said "Yes, but only a couple of lessons". After the session I was approached by a person from, I believe, San Diego State, who said that they are about to publish some materials, and I should come to their session. That was great, but I suppose this is not a community that appreciates freebies :)

But to go back to my title. Half way through the day I ran into Yvonne (you will have to pardon the lack of linkage in this post), a graduate student from UCD whom I met at some math conferences couple of years ago. Turns out she's organizing Math Circles in Davis, and I will be helping with Teacher's Circles in Salt Lake City. She and her friend Brandy went out to dinner with us. Brandy turns out to be a grad student at UCD as well, but in math biology. So I mention that I know a professor there who is math bio, and she immediately tells me a name of another professor who used to be in Salt Lake when I was a grad student there who I remember moved to Canada. I guess it was too cold up there for him. With us at dinner were Sendhil, a math teacher, and John, a former high school math teacher who is now with Math for America, both from NYC. Sendhil was at the Math and Social Justice conference about which I first read at mrc's blog. Then we started talking about blogging teachers, so I mentioned Jonathan. Do I have to say that John knew him? Sendhil knew about Darren's class blogs. The world is small.